Department of Art History

Congratulations to Professor Megan Sullivan for being selected to receive a Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring! This award honors faculty members for their achievements in classroom teaching and for their special contributions in advising and mentoring graduate students. This process is spearheaded by graduate students, who coordinate with the department the application and collect letters from their peers. Those letters were instrumental in describing how Megan has become a leading pedagogical force within the university.  

As a scholar of Latin American modernism, Megan Sullivan empowers her students to confront the strangeness and material obstinance of abstract art with tools that collapse the boundaries between geographic and temporal regimes, producing a universalism that does not homogenize individual perspectives into general concepts, but recognizes and promotes differences. She cultivates open debate to give it life and form, not by managing its contents but by facilitating its multiple expressions. As the pandemic restricted their travel, closed their archives, and isolated them from each other, she has successfully dismantled the hierarchies separating advisors from students. By attending to them as individuals with serious talents, by allowing them to build their own intellectual profiles, Megan is already doing what many of us still seek to do.